‘Based on these observations, we hypothesize that you can make two modifications to the system to improve its effectiveness: trigger scaling up after 1 threshold breach instead of 5, which is in-line with the mantra of “scale up early, scale down slowly”; trigger scaling activity based on actual request count instead of consumed capacity units, and calculate the new provisioned capacity units using actual request count as well. As part of this experiment, we also prototyped these changes (by hijacking the CloudWatch alarms) to demonstrate their improvement.’

Memcached provides an external storage shim called extstore, that supports storing of data on SSD (I2) and NVMe (I3). extstore is efficient in terms of cost & storage device utilization without compromising the speed and throughput. All the metadata (key & other metadata) is stored in RAM whereas the actual data is stored on flash.